Dear Express Reader This week in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh, several backward caste leaders, including three ministers, walked out of the BJP and crossed over the political fence to join the Samajwadi Party. Swami Prasad Maurya, prominent five-term OBC MLA, spoke of how it would now be 85 per cent (in which he included backward castes, Scheduled Castes, farmers, unemployed) against 15 per cent (presumably, the rest, the privileged upper castes). It was evidently a taunt aimed at Chief Minister Adityanath who had claimed earlier that the upcoming UP battle would be about 80 per cent vs 20 per cent, which was widely read as a communal dog whistle. Akhilesh Yadav, SP chief, welcomed the defectors and spoke of how the coming together of “Samajwadis" and “Ambedkarwadis” would defeat the BJP in UP. It is not yet clear if this week’s defections will have an impact on the final scoreboard on March 10. For now, however, the UP crossovers frame two phenomena. One, they showcase the messiness of politics at the local level, the fluidity of political lines on the ground. Maurya’s arc is illustrative: He has travelled from the BSP to the BJP to the SP. That is, he has now been part of all three main contestants in the UP fray, in a time when the competition has become edgier and nastier. Two, they draw attention to a political inversion — in the last many years, ever since the BJP’s ascendance as the ruling party at the Centre and in many of the states, the BJP has been the party that defectors mostly cross over to, not the one they conspicuously cross over from. The first phenomenon, the untidiness and permeability of party-political lines at the bottom, has always been there, but is more remarkable today because of the hardening political polarisation at the top. As far as the second phenomenon is concerned, the BJP has not just been the beneficiary of the politics of defections, but it has also worked hard to ensure that the mud sticks less to itself, more to its political adversary. The BJP has taken a cue from the popular cynicism touched off against its political opponents by defections, among other things, to frame its own appeal — it counterposes a “bigger idea” and “bigger leader” against a “secularism” or a “social justice” seen to be diminished and dragged down by its criss-crossing flag-bearers in a state like UP. The big idea of the BJP is designed to lift above the ground-level distortions, of its opponents as well as its own, on its multiple wings — “nationalism” wedded to “Hindutva” layered with a “development” that focuses on the public provision of private goods. Quite simply, if one fails, the other kicks in. The big leader, Narendra Modi, is omnipresent inside homes as the provider of the gas cylinder, the toilet and the bank account, and yet is also the larger-than-life, faraway risk-taker who is not accountable for the glitches in implementation, or the corruptions and compromises of party footsoldiers. The non-BJP parties’ big failure so far has been that, even as they wrestle with the BJP in local, individual contests, they have not been able to recognise and challenge the whole breadth of the BJP’s ambition that also comes to its aid locally. Merely hoping to fight the BJP with the BJP defector, constituency by constituency, may not be enough, in UP or elsewhere. The parties of the Opposition will need to re-energise and restore their own agendas and leaderships, rescue them from their own shrinking. As the campaigns for five states take off, we’ll be keeping an eye on twists and turns of the kind we saw this last week in UP. Take care, be safe, Vandita | 
No comments:
Post a Comment